Brooke Betten
Oct 15, 2025
Abigail Ray's exploration of grief in her poems "Am I Haunting Your Drive Down Highway 101 With Your New Man?" and "Titan Arum"
If you have lived in any city long enough, there are paths you no longer tread. There are forgotten diners, bookstores, and cinemas you avoid looking in the eyes, because you once went there with someone you loved. Abigail Ray, poet, essayist, and experimental fictionist alike, illustrates this experience through her poems: ‘Am I Haunting Your Drive Down Highway 101 With Your New Man?’ and ‘Titan Arum’. Memory, once believed to be ephemeral, is reimagined as tangible. Ray uses geography and physical sensation as an archive of lost love, transforming remembering into a kind of haunting embodied in place.
“Am I Haunting Your Drive Down Highway 101 With Your New Man?” exudes bitter resentment over a love lost. She addresses her former partner directly, questioning whether they sense her ghost lingering in the spaces they once explored together. Ray explores this interpretation of haunting by forcing the reader to experience grief through all their senses. She repeatedly asks, 'Can you feel me? Can you taste me? Can you smell me? Does it hurt?’ The ghosts of love’s past exist in the scent of the highway air and the sound of the crackling radio. This interaction with physical texture seeks to pull that past into the present.
Evoking all five senses is a powerful ability. Memory relies not only on imagination but also on the material world that drags us into its tide. An inescapable trigger that forces us blindly into the past. Ray uses personal anecdotes to accomplish this, reminiscent of their own drives down the coast: the song Vide Noir, which they likely enjoyed together, the fish they ate, and the town, Florence, that they visited. Not only does she reminisce on their past, but she writes with resentment, begging the reader not to replace her and experience them with another. Recalling all of the senses creates an embodiment that the reader must live, and the narrative must haunt.
‘Titan Arum’ relocates the reader to a haunting garden. She fills the poem with mementos of a long-gone relationship, artifacts of love turned spectral. His clothes are in her closet, which still smells of his scent. An article that cannot be discarded or forgotten, despite her desire to.
Furthermore, she metaphorically refers to their disposition as being “the headlights that flash across my walls / I stare at them all night instead of call you.” This serves not merely to emphasize their former connection but also to draw the reader into the imagined space. This bright imagery allows you to see the phantom lights. Luring you into the haunted house and forcing you to sit idly, waiting for the lovelorn poltergeists to appear.
Titan Arum, the title of the poem, is a tall and rare flower, found primarily in Indonesia. Titan Arum goes by another name, “the corpse flower,” due to its stench of rotting flesh that attracts pollinators. Ray alludes to this at the end of the poem, writing:
When the flowers finally burst from the frozen ground
They will have the scent of a corpse.
I used our grave as a garden bed then feigned surprise
when the harvest I sowed reeked of death.
This conclusion reveals the poem’s central theme: the decay of a relationship, metaphorical or otherwise. Yet she still tries to cultivate new life from its remains, despite knowing it has failed. The relationship becomes a ghostly garden, a haunted house of memory, where everything sustained continues to reek of death.
Both “Am I Haunting Your Drive Down Highway 101 With Your New Man?” and “Titan Arum” employ apostrophes, as the author wistfully questions and reminisces directly to a forgone lover. The tone is the primary differentiator. “Am I Haunting Your Drive Down Highway 101 With Your New Man?” has a bitter edge where she begrudgingly asks: Do you remember me? Am I haunting the place you still drive to, but was once loved by both of us? “Titan Arum” takes a more somber yet distressed approach, more latent with grief. There are items in her room that remind her of their relationship ending. They exist as ghosts.
Despite their tonal differences, both allude to death as a symbol for relationship termination. In the former, she metaphorically claims that their abruptly ending relationship is, “someone's dead uncle's ashes in an urn, sitting up on a mantle collecting dust”. In the latter, she writes: “I used our grave as a garden bed,” suggesting that their relationship is a foundation to grow rotten-smelling plants that “reek of death”, perhaps symbolic of the consequences of losing their love.
Memory, according to Abigail Ray, does not exist in past moments; it exists in the body, in a location. In ‘Am I Haunting Your Drive Down Highway 101 With Your New Man?’, Ray painfully begs the question, Are we still here? Despite the present where we are no longer together, does the past still exist in the material world? ‘Titan Arum’ follows the same logic: does the smell of old clothes mean that you once existed as someone to me? The poems masterfully depict the experience of lost love as a place, a geographical grief. Their shared history is not merely a memory, but an artifact existing in archives of remembered spaces.